The Orchid Throne

by Jeffe Kennedy

  The man didn’t have a meek or obedient bone in his body and it would no doubt be his destruction. How he’d survived slavery I didn’t know. They should have broken him.

  “Don’t do it, Lia,” Con said, though I hadn’t replied, his voice rough with urgency. Always hoarse, it got more so with emotion. For a moment I wasn’t sure what he didn’t want me to do. “Don’t marry Anure.” He said it as if we were friends. As if he cared to give me heartfelt advice. “Don’t do it,” he repeated.

  “I have no intention of doing so,” I answered on a quiet breath, sounding far too serious. Risky to confirm even that much, rather than laughing in his face. This man could betray me. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he would—and he seemed so … distressed that I hadn’t found it in myself to deny it the way I should. I needed to counter his assumptions, however. Sometimes retreat is the better part of valor.

  I stepped back, smoothly moving away from him, the silk of my gown cool now where his burning hands had been.

  “I have no immediate plans of marrying His Imperial Highness.” I was repeating myself, reaching for my usual poise on the subject. “Our engagement has been extended due to numerous extenuating circumstances.”

  “His other wives?” Con sneered it, but I thought that might be reflexive, because the eyes that studied me so intently held no contempt. Instead he seemed to be trying to read my mind, to ferret out my strategy. An uncomfortable sensation.

  “That’s one reason.” I could confirm that much, as it was common knowledge. “There are several barriers to our eventual blessed union.” My standard words sounded false and empty even to my ears. Con had me thoroughly rattled; it would be wisest to end this interview and withdraw. But I couldn’t quite make myself do it.

  “I don’t believe you mean that,” he said slowly, studying my face, which I knew revealed nothing, as I had it smooth and composed. I lowered my eyes, in case he could read something in them. “Why this farce?” he asked, sounding so much as if he cared that I wanted to give him a true answer. He did possess a certain charisma despite his rough manners. No wonder his people had followed him. Something about him made me want to share my secrets and rest in the comfort of his strength and determination.

  Which I could not do. He thought our goals aligned, but they didn’t. I didn’t know how he’d retained the optimism that he could beat Anure, when I knew with absolute certainty that it couldn’t be done.

  “I do what I have to,” I replied. “I do what I must to protect Calanthe.”

  “I understand that,” he said, coming closer again, the wolf stalking. “But you have other options.”

  “Like what?” I demanded, half incredulous, half desperately wanting to know if there was an exit from this trap I hadn’t been able to find.

  “Marry me instead.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it again without speaking. At a total loss for words as I’d never been in my entire life. And not only because of the mortal offense he’d just offered.

  He returned my stare, golden eyes wide with the same shock I felt, as if he hadn’t expected those words to come out. Startling, impossible, earthshaking words. The round garden seemed to spin in circles, dizziness swamping me, and if not for the rigidity of my corset and other garments, I might’ve sagged. Despair and delight. Wonder and horror.

  The girl in me, long since buried under the weight of the crown, might have wept.

  Once there had been a bright path for her, the girl I could’ve been. In another world, another time line, she would’ve had a compelling man propose marriage to her in a garden. She might’ve had many suitors, her choice of partners. A chance at—if not exactly normal—a marriage of minds and bodies.

  No longer. Just one of the many things Anure had destroyed. Because I couldn’t scream my rage at the injustice of it all, I laughed.

  I burst out laughing at the great cosmic joke. Of course, it only made it more pointed that my potential husband in a marriage of state brought a woman who was mostly likely his lover with him to my court. Never mind that I’d had to make him my prisoner to please my most loathed enemy. Really, it was all too absurd to bear.

  Once I started laughing, I found it nearly impossible to stop, though hurt and fury flashed across Con’s face. But he didn’t stomp off to nurse his wounds. Nor did he join in my laughter like a smoother courtier might, pretending to find my amusement his. He simply waited until I, gasping for breath and clutching my constricted ribs, managed to quell the hysterical laughter. When I was done, he gave me an expectant look, as if still waiting for an actual answer. I searched for a reply, realizing my outburst meant I could hardly fob him off with something bland.

  Settling on the simplest reply, I shook my head. “No.”

  “Why not?” he shot back, hard on the heels of my denial.

  I wanted to throw up my hands at him. To blister him with a setback that would peel his ears from his head. Fool. Incautious rebel. He could never understand the compromises a woman like me had to make.

  Instead I paced over to the orchids wending up the old fruit tree nearby. They shimmered with delicate colors in the dappled shade, undulating along the trunk and limbs, perching on twigs like exotic birds that might take flight on ruffled petals.

  “Did you know orchids can’t live on their own?” I asked, though I knew it was a rhetorical question, as Con could hardly know anything about the flowers that grew only on Calanthe. “They take their nourishment from the trees, perhaps from the rain and the very air. But they cannot be planted. They’re not like other flowers. Beautiful, fragile, they exist on nothing, dependent on everything.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Con, who watched me with a furrowed brow. A dark and threatening man, one who’d killed without remorse. One whose actions had condemned him to death. A king of nothing. And yet he seemed to be the solid tree to my epiphytic flower.

  “Interesting,” he said, eyes on me and not the blossoms, “but is there some point you’re making?” He ground out the words as if they hurt his throat. For all I knew, they might. I had no idea what kind of damage caused him and Sondra to sound like that.

  “We are all what we’re born to be, Con,” I replied. “I can’t marry you—even if I wanted to—because I’m engaged to the emperor. You are legally a slave, a fugitive, and a prisoner bound to answer for war crimes, among other charges. Even without those truths, I’m queen of Calanthe and duty-bound to marry to make heirs for my realm and you’re a landless man with no title, no bloodline you can claim. There is no world in which we’d marry.”

  Even that girl I might’ve been had the world been different would have turned away such an offer. In truth, in that other world, we would never have met.

  “There is that world,” he insisted. “If Anure hadn’t made his conquests—”

  “But he did.” I cut off that line of speculation. “The past doesn’t change.”

  “The future does change,” he countered, “and only if we change the present. Marry me and we can change the world together. I think you hate Anure as much as any of us. Don’t martyr yourself. Use your power as queen of the last independent kingdom in all the empire to end his blight upon the world.”

  It sounded so good. Tempting. And too good to be possible.

  I laughed, lightly, the bitterness in it clear to my own ears, though thankfully without the hysteria that had gripped me earlier. “Independent? You are not as clever as I thought. Calanthe and I are as independent as this orchid. On our own, we wither and die. Pretty, but ultimately insubstantial.”

  His gaze fell to my ring. “What of that one? It lives on, immortal though severed from its source. Perhaps you and Calanthe are like that.”

  I fought the urge to hide the ring behind my back. “You’re wrong. It’s a fresh blossom, plucked anew every day.”

  Frowning, he met my gaze. “That’s a lie. Why would you tell a lie about the Abiding Ring?”

  My breath caught in my throat and I held it there, concentrati
ng on that rather revealing response. Perhaps the pause went on too long, but my voice came out smooth and vaguely puzzled when I managed it. “Why would you call it that?”

  His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Ask Ambrose.”

  “I will.” The wizard did know about the ring, which meant I’d have to do whatever it took to keep him on Calanthe. Time to end this circular conversation and take steps to do what I could accomplish and forget the impossible. “Speaking of whom, will you go along with the charade? If I can substitute others for Ambrose and the Lady Sondra, do you vow that you won’t betray the trick?”

  “You’d trust the vow of a slave, traitor, and man demonstrably without honor?”

  An excellent point, and yet … “I would,” I told him. “If only because you love them and will do anything to save their lives.”

  “Ambrose got me into this trap. I’m not feeling the love at the moment,” he answered.

  “And the Lady Sondra?” I asked, surprised to feel a flare of jealousy for the warrior woman. “You love her.”

  He regarded me with a frown, seeming torn. But he met my gaze steadily. “There’s no one I love more in this world.”

  I nodded to myself. Exactly as I’d perceived, and I appreciated that he hadn’t lied to me. “Regardless of your other flaws—and you no doubt have many—you also love your people. We have that much in common.”

  He grunted as if I’d struck him, his eyes bleak. Then he managed that wry smile again, though it came out a shadow of its usual self. “You are … not what I expected, Lia.”

  I didn’t have to ask what he’d expected. I knew. After all, I’d created that image of myself with tireless determination. Ridiculous that I should feel a tinge of regret—both that he hadn’t thought much of me and that now that he knew better, it didn’t matter.

  “If I so swear,” he continued, “will you vow to protect them?”

  “As well as I can protect anyone, yes.”

  His smile widened. “I imagine no one wins an argument with you.”

  “Well, I am the queen,” I returned with asperity. “No one usually dares to argue with Me.”

  I’d maybe hoped he’d laugh, but his smile faded. “Except me.”

  “Except you,” I acknowledged. Wolf of my dreams. Destroyer of kingdoms. Rebel and doomed man. He’d reached out to the wrong person—I couldn’t save him. “Do we have a bargain?”

  “What about my people on the ship in the harbor?”

  “They will have escaped during the night.” I fluttered my lashes and shrugged as if baffled. Con’s gaze went to my powdered bosom, as if he couldn’t help looking, before he wrenched it away. I smiled and he acknowledged it wryly. “I thought we had it guarded,” I continued in a vacuous tone, “but it disappeared to who knows where.” I added a giggle, then sobered. “I assume they can easily rejoin the rest of your fleet prowling just outside my waters.”

  He caught himself from showing surprise, then shook his head when he realized I’d seen it. “Should I even ask how you know about that?”

  I gave him an arch look, enjoying that he seemed impressed. “You can ask…”

  This time he laughed and I found myself smiling back. A wrong and genuine one that made the trio of jewels at the corner of my mouth pull. Exchanging these confidences, bits and pieces of secret strategies, felt illicit and strangely pleasurable. Something I couldn’t afford to feel. I already regretted coming to know him this well. His death, already a stain on my conscience, would weigh more heavily on me now. I’d feel a hole in my life where he might’ve lived. I needed to put an end to this.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He nodded curtly. “I can hardly refuse such an offer. Just…” He firmed his lips. “Treat them well. They’re the best of people.”

  “I will.” I felt that I should say something more, but came up empty. “Guard!” I called, and the door opened immediately, Xichos with his sword at the ready. He looked almost disappointed to see me intact and unbloodied. “I’ll see the next now,” I ordered. “Escort the lady in and take this prisoner away when you bring her.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.” He bowed and closed the door. Con didn’t move, watching me still with some grim thoughts in his mind. As if he had any other kind. Even his proposal of marriage had seemed more like a desperate challenge than anything else. Perhaps his entire existence felt to him as much of an endless battle as mine did to me. We simply fought in different ways.

  “I am sorry,” I told him, letting my true regret show. “I don’t wish your fate on you.”

  “Will you mourn my death?” he asked lightly, mockingly.

  “Yes,” I replied. When he raised a dubious brow, I gave him my standard line. “I told you, everyone has value.”

  “Ah.” He seemed about to say something more, but evidently changed his mind, instead bowing as he hadn’t before, an echo of gallantry in it. “It’s been a pleasure, Queen Euthalia. Despite everything.”

  I had to smile. I doubted any other man could say such a thing under these circumstances. “I wish I could say the same,” I said, impetuously. Too honest, because it gave him pause.

  “Am I so repellent?” he asked.

  He seemed—absurdly, given his blazing confidence and arrogance—actually self-conscious, so I gave him another honest answer. Perhaps there’s something about talking to a man doomed to die that makes it difficult to lie to him. “Not at all. You are also not what I expected, Con. I will mourn your death because…” I faltered, rather alarmed at what I’d been about to confide.

  “Because?” He closed the distance between us, gaze bright and intense on mine.

  I felt that strange dizziness, that longing for what could never be. A personal mirror of the longing of all the world to be something more than a maelstrom of hatred and fear. “Because in another world I might’ve said yes,” I whispered.

  The gate opened, saving me from my impetuous words, the guard escorting the Lady Sondra in, thankfully without chains. Con didn’t even glance their way. “You still can,” he urged, his voice quietly urgent. “You have the power to stop all of this, Lia. You’re stronger than you know.”

  “Stand down!” Xichos thundered. “You dare disrespect the queen, you mongrel.” The guards seized Con, dragging him back—though it took four of them to do it, as the big man had dug in with casual strength, gaze still fierce on mine.

  “It’s not too late, Your Highness,” he said.

  Though he was wrong about that, too. It was entirely too late.

  For us both.

  20

  “What good is being a wizard if you can’t use your magic to save my cursed life?” I snarled the question while I paced restlessly around the circle of the room as I hadn’t allowed myself to do in that bloodless battle with Lia, grimly aware that our tower room and her private courtyard were about the same size, though worlds apart.

  Ambrose sat sideways on the bed he’d adopted, leaning his back against the stone wall of the tower, Merle perched on the ledge of the open window beside him. Both Ambrose and Merle regarded me with attentive gazes, along with slightly bemused smiles. If ravens can smile.

  “That’s not really how magic works,” he replied.

  “Right—it defies explanation.” I meant that to be scathingly mocking, but Ambrose nodded, as if a particularly dense student had suddenly grasped a difficult concept.

  “Exactly.”

  “If it defies explanation,” I reasoned, “then how can you say that’s not how it works. If you know how something doesn’t work, you know the reverse: how it does.”

  “Aha! Not true.” Ambrose tapped his fingers together. “If a sword goes through your heart and it stops beating, then you know your heart doesn’t work with a sharp object cleaving it in two. But that doesn’t mean you know how the heart beats in the first place.”

  If my head didn’t ache with impotent frustration already, that would have pushed me over the edge. As it was, I glared at him hard enough th
at he sat back again, subdued. “I’m not interested in debating riddles of logic.” I’d had plenty of that with Lia. Tricky, clever, and foolishly obstinate woman. Had I really blurted out that offer of marriage?

  Had she really said that in another world she might’ve said yes?

  Her circular arguments made my head hurt, but those last words had pierced my heart like the sword Ambrose evoked so carelessly. I was as much the King of Regret as anything. I’d built an internal kingdom of it, cursing every bad turn that destroyed my birthright and future. She saw it, too, that world. In a world without Anure’s devouring greed, Calanthe and Oriel could’ve been allies. Lia and I might’ve been encouraged to meet, to consider a marriage of state.

  Perhaps this day, this meeting in the garden, had been one of Ambrose’s nexus points. Maybe time and coincidence had always flowed to that conversation, where she and I met and matched wits, where we discussed marriage between us. That was the bit that made my heart—still beating, apparently, despite the many injuries to it—sting with the bitter salt on the wound. I could envision that alternate meeting. I’d have come to her as a prince, eloquent and mannered, ready to charm. And she … She wouldn’t be determinedly engaged to a monster, planning to feed herself to it in the hope of choking it to death.

  Oh, she’d denied it, but I could see her endgame as if it were mine. Not difficult to do, as my plan didn’t differ much. Get close enough to kill and damn the consequences.

  Though we couldn’t be more different in every outward aspect, Lia and I were the same inside.

  “If you’re not interested in riddles,” Ambrose said, genially, as if making conversation over tea, “then perhaps you’ll tell me what happened. Other than that you seem to have been unsuccessful in wooing the lovely Euthalia and instead of giving you her hand, she’s giving Anure your head.”

  I tossed him an incredulous stare. “Did you really think I’d come back here and announce our impending nuptials?” Though, for a moment there, from the wild and surprisingly reckless glint in her eye, the way she’d leaned into my touch with that sweet tremble, I’d thought she might indeed say yes.